Miami Turns Up the HEAT with Avid

It’s not just about the game anymore. It’s about the brand.

Ed Filomia,Senior Director, Broadcast Services

For an NBA team like the Miami HEAT, it’s not just about what happens during the game—it’s about providing fans with a well-rounded entertainment experience. Ed Filomia, Senior Director of Broadcast Services and the HEATV editorial staff do more than simply record events—they face a constant challenge to create as much content as possible to engage and energize the HEAT fanbase. “It’s not just about the game anymore. It’s about the brand,” Filomia explains.

The team relies on an array of Avid video, media management, and shared storage solutions to extend the HEAT brand across multiple screens. Using all of the media at their disposal, the group assembles everything from sponsorship advertisements to funny features for concession stand HD displays in the American Airlines Arena.

A game-changing approach to sports marketing

Archived video clips, games, and highlight reels are extraordinarily valuable for a team like the HEAT, and the HEAT production team uses these assets to create content to engage fans, generate advertising revenue, and build the team brand. Interplay provides the team with the workflows they need to be able to find, arrange, edit, review, and annotate the most exciting plays and game-winning clips—faster than ever before. Featuring an unprecedented level of collaborative capability, Interplay gives the group total access to their media, enabling everyone in the workflow to manage both data and the metadata associated with it.

“Our most important asset is that Dwayne Wade dunk clip,” Filomia explains, “because it’s not just that clip, but the nine other angles and nine other elements that go with it. It’s everything that happened between 9:40 and 9:40:30. And when all those elements all get assembled into marketing packages, that moment is absolutely priceless.”

Virtual in-house production agency

Filomia and his HEATV crew have built a virtual in-house agency to rapidly create, access and distribute HEAT franchise assets for monetization. In fact, HEATV has been recognized by I.D.E.A. (Information Display Entertainment Association) as one of the best video production teams in sports entertainment.

“Teams are under increasing pressure to put an increasing share of investment into the kind of video presentations that populate multimillion dollar video boards, marquees, electronic signage, and IPTV,” Filomia explains. “My peers throughout the sports industry are facing the same challenges and have been inquiring about our model.”

Footage of players, coaches, cheerleaders, and Miami’s beautiful scenery are the basis of the promotions and feature stories that sell the HEAT brand. With Avid solutions in place to effectively manage those assets, Filomia’s group is moving past the traditional function of handling the season’s actual game content. The focus now is on the next generation of revenue streams.

“Our vision has always been to use the equipment to create an in-house production department capable of taking care of all our promotional needs, including creation of motivational videos for HEAT President and legendary coach Pat Riley,” Filomia says.

Growing the HEAT Group infrastructure

The HEAT Group has long used a variety of video formats. Now, to expand the HEAT brand on an unprecedented scale, the group is building out an infrastructure that moves material among EVS servers, XDCAM optical discs, and Avid editing and storage systems.

“We previously didn’t have an XDCAM workflow, but knew someone would develop a system we could grow with,” Filomia says. “This is where Avid stepped in with an asset management system that gives us the ability to catalog, archive, and manage media in a centralized storage facility.”

Avid stepped in with an asset management system that gives us the ability to catalog, archive, and manage media in a centralized storage facility

After each game, the media manager is given a melt reel with about 30 minutes of camera-isolated feeds and clips. Dixon Sports Computing created an interface coupled with the EVS system to marry the official NBA statistical metadata to the clips via timecode. The clips are then exported to an XDCAM disc for ingest into the Avid systems.

At the end of the day, Interplay allows us to go into the system,” explains Filomia,” retrieve what we want from all the content we have created so the producer can search for the right clips and hand them to the editor.We have never been able to do that before.”